China has quietly built a financial workaround allowing it to keep paying for Iranian oil despite sweeping U.S. sanctions, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

UK digital bank Monzo is weighing a fresh attempt to secure a US banking license, four years after abandoning its previous bid when talks with regulators stalled, according to the Financial Times. 

Illegal gold mining has grown into one of the Western Hemisphere’s largest and fastest‑expanding illicit economies, out‑earning narcotics in parts of Colombia and Peru and pushing conflict‑linked gold toward U.S. ports and banks. 

Jeffrey Epstein remained embedded in Wall Street’s elite financial networks in the years before his 2019 death, maintaining accounts at more than 20 banks and executing large transactions with prominent investment firms, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal. 

A previously undisclosed report by the Inspector General for the U.S. State Department and officials interviewed by ProPublica allege that former Ambassador to El Salvador Ronald D. Johnson protected Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele from American and Salvadoran law enforcement efforts. 

North Korea’s government-backed IT workers are quietly infiltrating global tech firms and contractor platforms, earning steady crypto salaries that are laundered through a sprawling network of intermediaries to fund the regime’s weapons programs, according to new analysis from Chainalysis.

French authorities are investigating a crude oil tanker suspected of operating within a “shadow fleet” moving Russian oil, after the vessel “Boracay” anchored off Saint-Nazaire, Reuters said citing the French Navy.

International payments cooperative Swift will launch a permissioned blockchain to route transactions among global banks as part of a bid to modernize cross-border payments and blunt the rise of dollar-pegged stablecoins. 

The U.S. Treasury Department has postponed enforcement of its new residential real-estate reporting rule until March 1, 2026, issuing a temporary exemptive order to give the industry more time to prepare. 

Pig-butchering schemes have scaled into a multibillion-dollar criminal industry, according to a new report by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic cited by CoinDesk.